Re: How to change people's minds about LISP?

* Christopher C. Stacy:

>> The simple reason might be that it's so hard to use
>> it as a drop-in C replacement.
>
> System administrators write throw-away programs in C?

Some of them do, yes. But Perl is much more common, especially among
the younger generation.

> Or did you mean that Perl is a drop-in replacement for C?

Lisp could be a drop-in replacement for Perl. Not for all of Perl's
features, of course, but in areas where it makes sense. What you'd
need is a reasonably documented system call/libc interface (and for
that, you apparently need FFI support for 64 bit numbers). cl-ppcre
could be helpful, too, if it compiles regular expression fast enough.
Otherwise, just link in PCRE. You just go along and add the things
you need, and at some point, publish your collection, and commit to
its maintainance.

Actually, it's not too hard to compete with Perl in this area. Perl
has some weaknesses (not just code maintainability). An instructive
example is that regular expressions as a first-class type are pretty
recent innovation in Perl land. 8-)
.

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